Fresh paint is the smell of back-to-school. At least for me. It was always industrial yellow with raised lumps of white stuff. As you queued the corridor for lunch on the first day back, you could still chisel out paint patterns with your thumbnail.

That fresh paint smell is so imprinted on my mind as part of the Back-To-School that come September I now experience a primal urge to start decorating!

We live surrounded by artificial calendars. When exactly is the new year? The calendar tells me it’s January 1st. The tax year tells me it’s April 5th. The multinational corporation I spent 11 years working for used to insist it was February 1st!

The most powerful of all though is the new year that we grew up with: the September – July school year.

You don’t need kids in your life to experience the gravitational pull of Back-To-School. It’s hard-cored into us. That slight drop in temperature, the heavier dew on the lawns in the morning, the first tell-tale color-shift leaves and the shortening days. They all point one way.

Don’t under-estimate what powerful formative experiences those Back-To-School occasions were for you. There were new teachers, new subjects, and most scarily of all, there were occasionally whole new schools.

Take a moment. Put your mind back into those days.

That strange feeling that you’re getting, that sense of equal parts excitement mixed with fear, that’s the Back-to-School Feeling. It’s the feeling we get when we’re facing something big, challenging, and largely unknown. It’s the feeling we get when the only direction we can move in is forward, even though if we had a choice, we’d quite like to turn and run!

It’s a feeling that is priming us to be at our best in the face of challenge. It was actually a pretty cool feeling. If given the choice to click our fingers and physically return to those days, not all of us would do it (I for one am fairly sure I’d turn-down a time-ticket back to teenage), but still this time of year can deliver a major kick.

Think of your next presentation as being your very own grown-up Back-To-School. Access those old feelings that are just below the surface for you right now.

How can you give your presenting, and your presentations, that new paint smell?

The biggest battle presenters face is the battle to push their comfort zones as speakers

by Peter Watts

Speaking to larger audiences, to more challenging audiences, or even taking those first few steps to speak at all can feel like enormous leaps. Sometimes it can feel like too big a leap, and we don’t even try, or we give up at the first hurdle.

Last night, yet again watching the Olympics on a ceiling-mounted restaurant television, I saw a man on prosthetic legs position himself into the starting blocks for the Men’s 400 meters at the London Olympics.

The man’s name is Oscar Petronius. He’s a South African athlete known as “The Blade Runner”, and when he competed last night, he made history as the first double-amputee to take part in the Games.

Reading his accomplishments in this morning’s press, I was struck by the words to which Oscar Pistorius attributes his strength:

“A loser isn’t the person that gets involved and comes last, but it’s the person that doesn’t get involved in the first place.”

Apply those words to public speaking. An incredibly good fit aren’t they. How many opportunities do we lose because we don’t get involved in the first place.

Here are a few web-links with coverage about Oscar Petronius, the one-man inspiration factory.

Inevitable with a Victorian cottage. Moisture slowly creeping up an outside wall. Tell-tale watermarks on plaster in the hall.

Months of contractor confusion led to my hiring an independent surveyor to take charge. He promptly nailed the source of all my problems as being a tiny pipe, steadily and slowly dip drip dripping beneath a floor.

Seemingly tiny little leaks of self-esteem can have exactly the same effect on our confidence.

The most damaging are those hidden beneath the floor-boards of our bravado; the inner comments we make to ourselves when offered the chance to take on new challenges.

“I’m no good at x”

“I’ll screw it up if I dare to have a go at y”

“I’ve not got what it takes for z”

Over months and years, those drips become a damp-spreading mantra, soaking foundations. Our confidence water-logs from within.

My surveyor told me that to identify a hidden leak it’s important to listen both to what you can hear, and to what you can’t.

Listen for noises that shouldn’t be there (in my watery case, an almost inaudible hissing sound), and then listen for the sounds that are missing, such as the high pressure surge of water rushing through a healthy system.

As a presenter, do you suffer a low level hiss of negative internal criticism?

After speaking, how clearly can you hear your that healthy surge of success?

Maintaining a constructive inner-dialogue is essential presenter care-and-maintenance. Self-coaching can be one way to do this, but sometimes problems require the help of an external expert for true diagnosis.

Professional coaching assists presenters at all stages of their careers, in the same way that my professional surveyor was able to help me.

It’s well worth taking the time to fix those little leaks.

At the end of the day, nobody enjoys a presentation from a damp-patch.

The hormone we associate with presentation stress is adrenalin, and it’s a great little hormone. It boosts our performance, sustained for just long enough by its buddy-hormone, epinephrin.

Think of epinephrine as a garden centre grow-bag for adrenalin. It delivers optimal nutrients to extend your adrenalin spike. Whereas adrenalin is short-lived, epinephrin is sturdy. Its designed to stay in our bodies until the stressor has passed, and shifting it from your system requires aerobic activity. Without this, it hangs around, and here’s where things can go wrong?

When something stresses us, the body releases adrenalin and follows it up with a slug of epinephrin. Imagine that you have just finished a presentation. You are, at that moment fully topped-up on epinephrin which, without aerobic activity, will hang around your system all the way home and beyond.

If something else stresses you, say someone in their car cuts you at the lights, then bang goes another shot of adrenalin, followed by yet another slug of epinephrin. That slug joins the epinephrin pool already present in your body and tops the system up to a new higher level.

Every subsequent stressor does the same thing, until rather than finding itself being followed by a controlled shot of epinephrin, adrenalin finds itself being fired into a pre-existing epinephrine lake?

This is where chronic stress syndrome starts. If not managed, the epinephrin lake never adequately discharges, producing stress-related health issues?

Aerobic activity is the solution, and this doesn’t require a gym. Take the stairs instead of the elevator whenever you can. With each step, you lower the lake. Dog walkers seem to be universally chilled people. Why? All that walking discharges epinephrine, and you don’t necessarily need a dog to do it. Much of my own life involves airports, and as a practical measure I avoid the moving walkways. Walking to the gate helps walk-off the epinephrin?

When presenting we often stretching our limits. It’s important afterwards to remember to stretch our limbs.

Beating presentation nerves can seem like a battle; a no-holds-barred FIGHT to overcome your fears. Bosses and colleagues, like drill sergeants, urge us from the trenches and up onto the no-mans land of the stage.

“You’re team needs you. Get out there soldier!”

This approach is completely wrong.

First point to be aware of: Presentation nerves can never be eliminated, and it would not be desirable to do so. Controlled nervous tension can promote excellence.

Second point to be aware of: The tangible bodily sensations that come with presentation nerves, can be easily managed if we understand the mechanics that create them.

That’s what this article will help you to do. I’m not going to tell you how to beat presentation nerves, because I believe that as a natural bodily reaction we should work with our jitters, not against them. When we focus on beating nerves we just drive them deeper into our psyches. Instead, we can understand them, and adopt simple measures that make presenting a significantly easier process.

Do any of the following affect you when presenting?

Tightness of breath

Rapid heart-rate

Sweating

Blushing

Cold or clammy hands

Trembling

Butterflies in the stomach

Nausea

Tension headaches

Loss of concentration

Dry-throat

Scratchy voice

Low self-esteem

If yes, then within the following articles, you will find practical measures that work with your body to overcome those reactions. Each heading is a link. Simply click on it to review the associated article:

Presentationnerves suppress appetite, so that when we approach a presentation we are more in need of food than we realize. As blood sugars collapse, our concentration collapses with them, and our stomachs develop those familiar butterfly wings.

Find out what to eat, what not to eat, and when to eat, in order to calm presentation butterflies

What happens after the presentation? How we coach ourselves once the event is finished will set up our confidence for next time. Find out how to be your own personal coach after every presentation.

Fear of public speaking is perfectly natural, and you are not alone in experiencing it. Indeed, some surveys have shown that for many people it isn’t just a fear, but their number one fear, and that’s why becoming a confident and competent public speaker is such a wonderful goal. If you can achieve this goal, then what other goals also become so much more achievable.

I believe public speaking is therefore a gateway activity. Once we prove to ourselves that we can successfully speak in public, we are empowered onwards to achieve so much more.

Enjoy all the articles linked from this blog, and if there are any areas of presentation nerves not dealt with here, that you might like help with, then please do post a comment.

It will be my pleasure to forward you the extra ideas that might help you forward into the highly rewarding world of presenting.

Hold a warm cup of tea. Or coffee. Or hot chocolate. It doesn’t matter. Hold a warm cup, and as you savor the heat radiating into your hands, a wonderful sense of calm comes with it.

Do this shortly before a presentation and you’ll get exactly the same reaction. Stress seems to mysteriously drain out of you.

There is a whole lexicon of words such as “toasty” that evoke the pleasure of warm hands and feet, and there is a physiological reason why we’ve developed them.

When we become nervous about something, presenting for example, one of the first physical symptoms is cold hands. As we enter fight or flight, our body diverts blood flow away from extremities such as the hands, and redirects it to the vital organs of the core. Because of this we develop the cold clammy hand sensation associated with presentation nerves.

This sets off a chain reaction. Our subconscious mind says to itself “Hello. I appear to have cold hands right now. I get cold hands when I’m nervous. Therefore I must be nervous, and being aware of that fact, am going to become even more nervous.”

If cold hands represent a state of nervous tension, then warm hands represent the exact opposite: relaxation. When we have warm hands, the mind associates this with a state of calm and safety, hence all the snuggle type language we have referring to the pleasantness of warm paws.

Knowing this, we can use a simple technique that I call “The Thawed Paws Pause” to trick our mental wiring into calmness pre-presentation.

Next time you are going to present, accept the offer of a hot drink. The contents of the cup are of secondary importance, but if you have a choice, then my recommendation would be something that is caffeine-free.

As you await your time to present, hold the cup and concentrate your mind on that lovely warmth entering your hands. Your mind is about to get a surprise, in that your internal dialogue is going to go something like this:

“I’m about to make a presentation. I get stressed when I make presentations, and when I get stressed I have cold hands, but hang on a moment! I have warm hands! When I get stressed I have cold hands, but right now I appear to have warm hands! Ah, I therefore can’t be stressed.”

As your subconscious plays with this concept, the body starts to stand down some of the reactions we associate with presentation nerves, and a degree of those stage-fright jitters slip away.

It’s a simple trick, and one of the earliest I was taught when I first started presenting.

Next time you feel stressed or nervous, check the temperature of your hands. Icy? Take a moment to hold a warm cup. Feel tension melt into your thawed paws pause.

For more ideas on how to control presentation nerves, try the following Presenters’s Blog posts:

There is a parallel between enjoying presenting and enjoying the Holidays.

Every Christmas I have a melt-down. I enter the festive season resolving “This time I will not be a stress-demon by Christmas Eve.” Unfortunately though, year after year, I find a certain amount of difficulty in measuring up to the goal, and I know I’m not alone!

Why is it so many of us go nuclear the night before Christmas, and why is there a parallel to the world of presenting?

There comes a time when we become responsible for delivering The Holidays. Be it Hanukkah, Christmas, or Eid, we wind-up in that festive hot-seat, and if we’ve been fortunate in life, we’ve been set some pretty high benchmarks by parents and grandparents before us.

Now it’s our turn to create those traditions for new generations, and to honor the examples of the generations who have gone before. It’s a lot to live up to. No wonder we get just that tiny bit stressed!

My partner and I had the baton passed to us some eight years ago, and we’ve had some real festive disasters since! There was the year the tree fell-over during the gift-giving, glass baubles exploding in amongst the presents. And then of course the year that the incredibly elaborate French-inspired Christmas-meal arrived to the table not only cold, but congealed.

Oddly though, our guests keep coming back for Christmas Day, and not just for the comedy value. It would seem that despite our worries to the contrary, we’re doing a pretty good job of hosting the Holidays.

Those examples that we fixate on emulating? Those are examples set by parents who had a good forty years of practice before we took over the traditions. Compared to them, we are of the lowliest novice grade, and while it’s great to have high benchmarks to aspire to, we only get there by experience.

Presenting and the Holidays improve with practice. Every time out, we get that little bit better. The secret is to give ourselves permission to enjoy the journey, and that way, those who accompany us, be they family, friends, or audience, get to enjoy it too!

This Christmas, give yourself permission to “be in the moment”. Enjoy all the wonderful kitsch Holiday chaos that swirls around, and above all, enjoy those with whom you share it.

If you’re Rafael Nadal, about to win your sixth French Open tennis tournament, then the process looks a little like this:

Push hair behind left ear

Push hair behind right ear

Knock heel of left shoe with tennis racket

Knock heel of right show with tennis racket

Scuff three steps sideways to the left along the back-court line

Scuff three steps sideways to the right along the back-court line

SERVE!

Athletes and sports-teams all have their own unique pre-performance rituals that they repeat before that first all important move onto the field.

For some, like the New Zealand All-Blacks rugby team, those rituals are dramatically overt, designed to both psyche the athlete and to intimidate the competition. For others, like Nadal, they are simply habitual actions that have become mentally linked to success.

Presenting is a performance sport. You too are on the field before an audience; You too have adrenalin flowing as if entering the Olympics; You too can benefit from pre-performance rituals.

Rituals connect you to a feeling of success. I know many presenters who have mantras that they quietly repeat to themselves, or use specific breathing techniques to get into the zone. I myself have the habit of quietly placing together my thumb, index finger, and middle finger in an accupressure position for a few quiet seconds before I present. Over years of repetition I now associate this simple hand movement with entering my calm-zone ahead of speaking. Nobody can see me do it, and the ritual’s associative power puts me exactly where I need to be before I go onstage.

Avoid rituals that rely on external objects such as the famous “lucky tie”. Think for example of the stories we hear about leading singers who couldn’t perform because there weren’t exactly five pink carnations to the left of their dressing room mirror, or someone forgot to remove the blue M&M’s from the candy bowl. These rituals fail because they rely on external objects or other people.

The guidelines for effective pre-presentation rituals are simple:

based on affirmations, minute gestures, breathing techniques, or visualizations that you can always summon when needed.

can be performed quietly and immediately without the outside world being aware of them

quick and simple, taking no longer than 3 – 5 seconds

effective in bringing you to the required performance state for the task at hand

If you don’t already have a pre-performance ritual of your own, try experimenting. The best time to adopt one is immediately after a successful presentation. In that moment when you are experiencing the endorphin rush of success, try to anchor that wonderful sensation with your own conscious ritual. Repeat the process at a later time, and you’ll feel the echo of the endorphins once again powering through your system and powering you out onto the stage.

Bob Dylan will help your presentations come to life. In fact not just Dylan; whether your genre is rock, soul, country, or blues, you can have fun with a presentation by slipping in the odd line of lyrics from your favorite song.

Why would you do this? Three reasons:

Firstly, to bring personal pleasure to your presentation. If you’re enjoying the session, then your audience will enjoy it too. Embedding the occasional song lyric, an aside that is meant for you alone, will quietly spike your energy and keep you upbeat.

Secondly, it helps with nerves. The pre-planned song lyric, chosen because you like it and can fit it into your narrative, acts like a pin to pop the bubble of any internal tension that has built up while you are talking.

Finally, in terms of their prose quality, song lyrics represent a highway of diamonds we can borrow at leisure, adding dimensions of rhetoric to presentations. They are a ready-made source of inspiration.

In the classroom, I suggest to teams that they incorporate such lyrics into their presentations. Despite initially believing that the trainer has lost his mind, everyone soon discovers what an effective technique this is to bring pleasure to presenting.

The steps to follow are simple:

What is my key message?

What song title or lyric do I want to include?

How can I drop that lyric seamlessly into my presentation in such a way that it fits with the message without drawing attention to itself?

Surprisingly high-calibre speakers often practice this art; Supreme Court Justices for example! According to a recent article on the NPR show “All Things Considered”, Dylan lyrics have found their way into no less than 186 court rulings. Even the supremely straight-laced Antonin Scalia has been known to drop the occasional Dylanism!

You can find the full NPR article by following this link, and maybe also, somewhere in this blog, you might even find my own gem of Dylan.

Presenting involves a contract between audience and presenter, and clearly stated starting and ending times are a key part of that contract. Compliance with these requirements is an important indicator of the health of that contract and the respect that both sides have for each other.

Start on Time

As presenter you control the room. You are going to be that group’s leader for however long you keep the stage. As with all groups, there is an initial period of gentle testing where the group explores the behavioral boundaries around them. “How firm is the leader going to be?” “Do they stick to their promises?” “Who is in charge?”

Although frequently sub-conscious, these questions are all hanging around the room, and there is no truer way of testing out the answers than by testing the area of time! If members of the audience are late, and you wait for them, then you allow power to transfer from yourself, to them. If you stick to your guns however and start regardless, then you retain the power balance for yourself, and late-comers become merely that; late!

Courtesy

If you hold up proceedings till all the laggards have assembled then the individuals who did extend you the courtesy of an on-time arrival rapidly learn that there is no reward for being on schedule. Your priority is to those who were on time. Don’t keep them waiting for others.

Finish on time

As important as starting on time, is finishing on time. While the start time is all about the audience extending courtesy to the presenter, it is by respecting the stated finish time that the presenter repays that respect. If the presentation is to last 30 minutes, then keep it to 30 minutes! Presenters who over-run are rewarded with seat-shuffling and increasingly exaggerated watch-checking.

What about the VIP?

I started out this blog by talking about power, and how within the presentation environment you are the leader. Where does this leave VIP members of the audience and what to do if it’s the head-honcho who is the tardy one?

The subject of the power dynamic between presenters and VIP’s would take up a whole extra blog, so I will restrict this point purely to the area of time-keeping.

If you are presenting, and you know that there is an especially important person in the room who must be there to hear what you have to say, then it would be foolish to start without them. The mere fact that someone in authority is abusing that position by being late rather than setting a positive example by being on time already indicates that they have a powerful sense of ego, so it would be a mistake to deliberately attempt to deflate that ego, tempting as it might be.

There is however, a half-way house that will allow you to start on time, while still waiting for the late VIP. The technique is to start a discussion with your audience while you are waiting so that the awkward gap becomes productively filled.

Welcome your audience as you would normally, thanking them for attending, and briefly outlining the presentation agenda and objectives.

State that you are going to wait a few more moments for Mr or Ms X to arrive, and then immediately tell the audience that in order to use this time productively, you would like to go around the table and find something out from them.

Use the ensuing discussion time to find out something relevant to your presentation. You have full control of what this subject will be; It could be their past experience with a product or process, their key objectives for the presentation, or their opinions about key challenges and opportunities faced.

Select a subject area that supports the thrust of your presentation, and avoid contentious areas that might detract from your message.

As you facilitate the discussion, capture key points onto a flip-chart so that they then remain visible for the rest of the session.

When the late VIP does then arrive, you can welcome them cordially, gently close down the discussion, and move into the planned body of your presentation. What has happened though is that you are now starting from a position of vastly increased strength. By being late, the VIP has given you the chance to work the room and develop a rapport with their team. You now have comments and people that you can refer back to for support as you present.

Above all, you kept control of the process, and without inflaming anyone’s egos, remained in charge of the room!